Anderson argues that contemporary nations have been profoundly shaped by the unique means by which they can project power. Nationalism’s rise both coincided with and further encouraged endless advancements in technology, the spread of capitalism around the globe, and governments’ rapid expansion through bureaucracy. These structures of power make modern states’ sovereignty unprecedentedly strong and yet also paradoxically more diffuse, since they’re supposedly run by the people on their own behalf rather than by and for any specific ruler. Anderson shows how this relationship is mutually reinforcing. Nationalism relies on a variety of administrative practices that allow people, territory, and history to be understood as controllable by the power of a centralized state. In turn, these practices become seen as natural and inevitable elements of statecraft: at the same time as nationalism purports to give power to the people, then, it also increases the power of state institutions at their expense.
Anderson shows how power first became more centralized under the states and empires that preceded modern nations. His account begins with the European colonial empires, which extended the relation between king and subject over huge geographical spaces for the first time to create a realm of rulers (the colonizing country) and a realm of inferiors (the colonies themselves). For the first time, power was centralized on a global scale, and important decisions were made continents away from the places they affected. One important indicator of this growing power was the journey Anderson calls the colonial pilgrimage, which is his term for the trips administrators or students would have to make between different regions of an empire. These journeys allowed them to experience the vastness of empire and the centralization of its power in the site of work or school (usually the capital). Then, they could communicate their firsthand experience to others they meet back home. Accordingly, these pilgrimages not only reflected the centralization of power in European empires, but also enacted it: first, returned pilgrims would make it clear to people at home that they were being ruled by strange people on another continent, and secondly, these pilgrims were often themselves the agents of imperial power (when they worked for the government, at least). Over time, these pilgrimages multiplied because of technological factors like improvements in trains and ships, which shrank the time needed to reach the imperial center. In short, technology drove further centralization by reducing the work needed to mediate (whether physically, socially, culturally, or emotionally) between the centers of power and the places they controlled.
In fact, the scale of centralization even determined when and where nation-states could form. Anderson specifically compares American colonies. The 13 British colonies in North America were well-connected, with integrated government pilgrimages, markets, and transportation, publishing, and legal systems, and these shared, centralized institutions helped the colonies revolt together and form the United States. Meanwhile, Spain’s Latin American empire was relatively decentralized, and Anderson thinks this is why it broke up into so many different countries. In other words, the scale of centralization became the scale of the nation. Anderson’s other primary example is the difference between Indonesia, on the one hand, and French Indochina and West Africa, on the other. Despite Indonesia’s enormous diversity, all its elites had to study in either Jakarta or Bandung, which contributed to a sense that those cities were the “center” of the colony. In contrast, the French built more schools in smaller, regional cities that later became hubs for their surrounding areas, bases of nationalist movements, and capitals of independent states. While Indonesians saw their nation as enormous, spread out, and centered on Jakarta and Bandung, French colonial elites imagined their native lands as bound to the smaller “feeder” territory of each colonial school.
Finally, Anderson shows how modern nations adopted the tools, structures, and techniques of power in order to govern themselves, which leads to a sort of paradox: the nation has to centralize its levers of power in order to democratically decentralize decision-making about how to use them. The tenth chapter looks specifically at three techniques of sovereignty in Southeast Asia: the census, which allowed nations to gain ostensibly complete knowledge of the people under their rule; the map, which did the same for territory; and the museum, which did something similar for history, monuments, and culture. In all cases, the state wanted to have complete information in order to exert complete control: to guide the population’s demographics, portion out land and determine what would be done with it, and decide what counts as the nation’s “official” history and heritage. In the distant past, governments would have lacked the means to do this (even though kings certainly would have had fewer qualms about abusing their subjects). Anderson uses these examples in Southeast Asia to make a broader point about all nations: power becomes more centralized and tools of social control become more sophisticated at the same time as it grows less acceptable for states to use them arbitrarily. But importantly, nations use these apparatuses specifically to promote nationalist ideas: to declare who is a legitimate citizen and to decide what places, narratives, and monuments people should use to define their country and national identity. This creates a positive feedback loop between nationalism and power: the centralization of power in certain places and on certain scales makes the idea of a bounded nation possible and appealing, which leads people to continue giving power to the places where it is already centralized, and to allow this power to be deployed in a way that further justifies its own centralization.
Anderson does not criticize nationalism for using the tools available for it: any government, presented with the technology and information now available to modern states, would use them to advance its own interests. But what is unique about advanced technology’s relationship to nationalism is that nationalism centralizes power while professing a belief in decentralization, government by and for all members of the imagined community.
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Centralization, Technology, and Power Quotes in Imagined Communities
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
It remains only to emphasize that in their origins, the fixing of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them were largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity. But as with so much else in the history of nationalism, once “there,” they could become formal models to be imitated, and, where expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit.
As noted earlier, the strange physical juxtaposition of Malays, Persians, Indians, Berbers and Turks in Mecca is something incomprehensible without an idea of their community in some form. The Berber encountering the Malay before the Kaaba must, as it were, ask himself: “Why is this man doing what I am doing, uttering the same words that I am uttering, even though we can not talk to one another?” There is only one answer, once one has learnt it: “Because we … are Muslims.” There was, to be sure, always a double aspect to the choreography of the great religious pilgrimages: a vast horde of illiterate vernacular-speakers provided the dense, physical reality of the ceremonial passage; while a small segment of literate bilingual adepts drawn from each vernacular community performed the unifying rites, interpreting to their respective followings the meaning of their collective motion. In a pre-print age, the reality of the imagined religious community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless travels. Nothing more impresses one about Western Christendom in its heyday than the uncoerced flow of faithful seekers from all over Europe, through the celebrated “regional centres” of monastic learning, to Rome.
For the new functionary, however, things are more complex. Talent, not death, charts his course. He sees before him a summit rather than a centre. He travels up its corniches in a series of looping arcs which, he hopes, will become smaller and tighter as he nears the top. Sent out to township A at rank V, he may return to the capital at rank W; proceed to province B at rank X; continue to vice-royalty C at rank Y; and end his pilgrimage in the capital at rank Z. On this journey there is no assured resting-place; every pause is provisional. The last thing the functionary wants is to return home; for he has no home with any intrinsic value. And this: on his upward-spiralling road he encounters as eager fellow-pilgrims his functionary colleagues, from places and families he has scarcely heard of and surely hopes never to have to see. But in experiencing them as travelling-companions, a consciousness of connectedness (“Why are we … here … together”) emerges, above all when all share a single language-of-state.
At the same time, we have seen that the very conception of the newspaper implies the refraction of even “world events” into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers; and also how important to that imagined community is an idea of steady, solid simultaneity through time. Such a simultaneity the immense stretch of the Spanish American Empire, and the isolation of its component parts, made difficult to imagine. Mexican creoles might learn months later of developments in Buenos Aires, but it would be through Mexican newspapers, not those of the Rio de la Plata; and the events would appear as “similar to” rather than “part of” events in Mexico.
In this sense, the “failure” of the Spanish-American experience to generate a permanent Spanish-America-wide nationalism reflects both the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century and the “local” backwardness of Spanish capitalism and technology in relation to the administrative stretch of the empire.
Insofar as all dynasts by mid-century were using some vernacular as language-of-state, and also because of the rapidly rising prestige all over Europe of the national idea, there was a discernible tendency among the Euro-Mediterranean monarchies to sidle towards a beckoning national identification. Romanovs discovered they were Great Russians, Hanoverians that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans—and with rather more difficulty their cousins turned Romanian, Greek, and so forth. On the one hand, these new identifications shored up legitimacies which, in an age of capitalism, scepticism, and science, could less and less safely rest on putative sacrality and sheer antiquity. On the other hand, they posed new dangers. If Kaiser Wilhelm II cast himself as “No. 1 German,” he implicitly conceded that he was one among many of the same kind as himself, that he had a representative function, and therefore could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans (something inconceivable in the dynasty’s heyday. Traitor to whom or to what?).
Some of the peoples on the eastern coast of Sumatra are not only physically close, across the narrow Straits of Malacca, to the populations of the western littoral of the Malay Peninsula, but they are ethnically related, understand each other’s speech, have a common religion, and so forth. These same Sumatrans share neither mother-tongue, ethnicity, nor religion with the Ambonese, located on islands thousands of miles away to the east. Yet during this century they have come to understand the Ambonese as fellow-Indonesians, the Malays as foreigners.
The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history.
Thus the model of official nationalism assumes its relevance above all at the moment when revolutionaries successfully take control of the state, and are for the first time in a position to use the power of the state in pursuit of their visions. The relevance is all the greater insofar as even the most determinedly radical revolutionaries always, to some degree, inherit the state from the fallen regime.
In the original edition of Imagined Communities I wrote that so often in the “nation-building” policies of the new states one sees both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm, and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth. My short-sighted assumption then was that official nationalism in the colonized worlds of Asia and Africa was modelled directly on that of the dynastic states of nineteenth-century Europe. Subsequent reflection has persuaded me that this view was hasty and superficial, and that the immediate genealogy should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state. At first sight, this conclusion may seem surprising, since colonial states were typically anti-nationalist, and often violently so. But if one looks beneath colonial ideologies and policies to the grammar in which, from the mid nineteenth century, they were deployed, the lineage becomes decidedly more clear.
Interlinked with one another, then, the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain. The “warp” of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore—in principle—countable. (The comic classificatory and subclassificatory census boxes entitled “Other” concealed all real-life anomalies by a splendid bureaucratic trompe l’oeil). The “weft” was what one could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made up of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series, and was to be handled in this light. This is why the colonial state imagined a Chinese series before any Chinese, and a nationalist series before the appearance of any nationalists.
